Frequency Based Fault Detection in Wind Turbines

In order to obtain lower cost of energy for wind turbines fault detection and accommodation is important. Expensive condition monitoring systems are often used to monitor the condition of rotating and vibrating system parts. One example is the gearbox in a wind turbine. This system is operated in parallel to the control system, using different computers and additional often expensive sensors. In this paper a simple filter based algorithm is proposed to detect changes in a resonance frequency in a system, exemplified with faults resulting in changes in the resonance frequency in the wind turbine gearbox. Only the generator speed measurement which is available in even simple wind turbine control systems is used as input. Consequently this proposed scheme does not need additional sensors and computers for monitoring the condition of the wind gearbox. The scheme is evaluated on a wide-spread wind turbine fault detection and fault tolerant control benchmark model, in which one of the included faults results in a change in the gear box resonance frequency. This evaluation shows the potential of the proposed scheme to monitor the condition of wind turbine gear boxes in the existing control system.